But the implications of the law could go beyond the question of whether Google News is good or bad for publishers. The law troubles advocates of Internet freedom (and, one imagines, Google and other Internet companies) because it seems to fit into a broader pattern, in Europe, of government actions that undermine what is sometimes known as the “right to link.” The best-known example of this is the decision, in May, by the European Court of Justice, that Europeans have a right to have links to information about them removed from search results—the “right to be forgotten,” which Jeffrey Toobin covered for the magazine in September.
“Linking is fundamental to the way the Web works,” Jeremy Malcolm, a policy analyst at the Electronic Freedom Foundation, told me. Search engines work by turning up links to sites whose content matches a search query; much of the sharing that takes place on social-media sites is of links; journalists themselves—including for this Web site—use links in their articles to provide context for their own pieces. (And, of course, those links are often accompanied by text snippets.) Malcolm noted that, in February, the European Court of Justice affirmed that when a Web-site owner links to a person’s copyrighted work on another site, that doesn’t constitute copyright infringement. But, he told me, “Having said that, there is no positive right to link expressed in legislation or any international agreement.”
Sarah Koenig Can’t Promise a Perfect Ending to ‘Serial’
Typically, when you work on stories like this, readers never get to see your sloppiness, they never get to hear your dumb questions and they never get to see that you weren’t sure of everything. Oh, so you think I’m sloppy and dumb?
No, I think that —I’m just kidding. But that may be the difference between working in print and radio. I’m just so used to everything being recorded, you kind of get over it.
Live TV with “Pre-Interview” on Jimmy Kimmel
But, here’s something that most people don’t realize about appearing on late night shows. There is a something called a “pre-interview” in which one of the producers of Jimmy Kimmel Live calls you up a few days prior to going on the show and you go over stories, anecdotes, current events, etc. that you might think to share. The producer then reviews this pre-interview phoner with Jimmy Kimmel. Then Jimmy Kimmel and his producer decide what stories are the best and create an order to how the conversation is going to go on air. (Most all of these live talk shows work this way, by the way.) The whole thing is planned out, and once you arrive at Jimmy Kimmel Live, the producer then comes to your dressing room and fills you in on what Jimmy has decided will be talked about. Then when your name is announced, you go stand in that little closed box, the door lifts up and you run out on stage to have a chat with Jimmy Kimmel…which again all seems very impromptu but the whole thing has been planned out.
New Yorker: How I Endorsed Andrew Cuomo
These paragraphs don’t appear in the campaign circular, and neither does my sign-off, in which I said that part of me was hoping that Cuomo’s efforts to stifle a challenge from the left would fail. These omissions aren’t surprising. The folks who put together political circulars seldom feel obliged to place quotes in their proper context, or to attribute them accurately. That’s the way the campaign game is played.